California (Fabric) Dreaming

Upper Newport Bay and the Back Bay are great bird-watching spots. It's so close we've been running over quite often, and spotted 2 Egrets and a Great Blue Heron only this evening, to say nothing of gulls and many smaller birds.

It's been so nice to hear all the ideas for where Lisa and I should go fabric shopping while I'm out here in California visiting her. Thank you all for thinking of us! We may not get everywhere we'd like to, but so far we've been to two fabric shops and one yarn shop. We are hoping to get to the Fashion District in LA, so I'll let you know if we make it.

The first fabric shop we hit was Button Boutique in Newport Beach (no website that I can find.) It's a very small place with gorgeous fabric of extremely high quality, and fantastic buttons, of course. There's a dressmaker on site, and the woman who runs the fabric part used to manage Left Bank Fabrics, which was a fantastic place also in Newport Beach. When they quit, she started doing this. I used to go to Left Bank way back when. It was rather famous, and for good reason. This lady knows her fabric.

Today we stopped at what is a home-dec fabric shop, but a really amazing one. It's called Home Fabrics and is in Lake Forest. I bought a few things there, but since they are being shipped, I can't show you yet. Lisa had told me we would go here before I came, since she knew I wanted to recover my kitchen chairs, and perhaps do a valance as well. They had the perfect thing. My kitchen is basically blue and white. I have dark blue countertops, white walls, dark blue with white pindot roman shades, and white cafe curtains. I used to have wallpaper with narrow blue lines and a fairly colorful bird border, but I recently changed it to plain white. Since I do have dark counters and oak cabinetry, I have white appliances to lighten things up, and thought white walls would be my best bet. I like them a lot, but now it's time for the chairs, etc.

The fabric we found is a gorgeous blue floral on white. It has more of a 'drawn' feeling to it than a lot of florals, and it was quite the bargain so I got enough for chairs, valance, perhaps an apron and placemats, etc.

That's all I was really looking for, but I found two other pieces that called my name as well. One is a dull gold satin with a sketchy blackish abstract print. I want to make a dressy dress from it. The other is really different. It's an unusually nice alligator vinyl on a knit backing. It's dark brown, and will become a purse.

We also went to the knitting night at Yarn Lady Friday night, and are planning to stop in again this coming Friday. They have a very nice group of ladies there, and there was even pie! How can we resist?

I finished another pair of hunting socks for my brother. I did the first sock on the plane, and the second one since. These are a 2-yarn blend like the last pair, except deep green for the plain yarn instead of navy, but with the same variegated sock yarn along with it. 3 pair should hold him for a while, but they're a great mindless project. perfect for travel knitting.

I'm posting from Pacific time, but my blog is set on Central time, so it's only about 10:15pm here right now. It's funny to see the time on the blogger site versus the time on the computer itself.